This will be a record of my attempts to develop a colour graphical OSD system. An OSD system is a device which overlays flight information onto the video feed when a pilot is flying under FPV, so that they are able to see their altitude, airspeed, GPS co-ordinates, remaining battery power or fuel, or direction back home.
There are a number of OSD systems available. Many of these are based on the Minim OSD board. This was originally designed by 3D Robotics but released as an open hardware project so there are many variations available and it is inexpensive. However it is entirely text based. The MAX7456 chip at the heart of it was intended to display black and white text over security camera feeds.
There have been projects to create true graphical OSD systems, such as AlceOSD. It is relatively straightforward to superimpose a black and white or greyscale image over a video feed using a modern microprocessor, doing the same with a colour image is much more challenging. The only widely available OSD capable of doing this is the EagleTree Vector. It is a closed-source commercial product.
I am aiming to create something of comparable performance, for the FPV community, which will be fully open that anybody can build on or customize. At present I have a working proof of concept which is capable of overlaying simple colour graphics and text. I will be releasing the schematics and source code soon.
Weka OSD 